This page is divided into two distinct parts. The first part is a brief version of "My revelation" that includes some important details not contained in My revelation. The second part is my most recent attempt to reformulate Christian teachings in terms of my spiritual experiences. It's presented in outline form.   The story begins in my second year of college as a pre-ministerial student at Concordia College in Portland, Oregon. The purpose of the college was to prepare young people for professional work in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Shortly before Christmas break I was reading the prophecies of Jeremiah as part of a personal endeavor to read the Bible from cover to cover. Suddenly God showed himself to me for several minutes and then left. The encounter was exclusively spiritual; that is, nothing to see or hear. Revelation: God is a person who can interact with humans and make himself known to them on a purely spiritual level. The encounter radically and permanently changed my life. Nothing had prepared me for it. With a fanatic’s intensity I then tried to “convert” everyone around me, believing that for the first time I knew what it was to be saved. After six months or so of such effort I concluded I was getting nowhere, so I internalized my fanaticism and devoted myself to seeking God on my own. After rapidly reading the rest of the Bible, I read it cover-to-cover another five times over the next 18 months, trying time and again with varying success to revive and relive the initial experience. Deduction: Maintaining personal knowledge of God is difficult for those who, like me at that time, must question whether the perceived is God or an artifact of one’s own physiology. An integral part of my response to God was formulation of numerous “laws” to keep myself pure. After the initial encounter, the modern world, and science in particular, seemed evil and at enmity with God. I had to separate myself from it; my laws provided the means. For example, I proscribed personal use of all man-made chemicals, including medicines and even soap. And I prayed that this God, who by the world’s standards was strange and alien, would make me to be strange and alien like him. Near the start of my fourth year of college (now in Fort Wayne, Indiana) I became so frustrated in my efforts to maintain a satisfactory relationship with God that I decided I would go all out to have him or die trying. Without a satisfactory relationship, life was not worth living. The method I chose was fasting. After I’d consumed only plain water for about 30 days, the dean of students found out and told me I must stop or leave; so I left. I returned to my parents’ home in southwestern Idaho. After fasting 42 days I concluded the fast was not working, and I resumed eating. I attributed the failure to all the disruptions. I felt closer to God but not close enough. I planned to continue fasting later in Idaho deserts, where there would be no disruptions. As it turned out, further fasting became unnecessary. Within a week or so after I resumed eating, God took me into himself and satisfied me far beyond my prior hopes or expectations. To my initial great surprise, our relationship became sexual. Not physical, but sexual. What I mean is that God totally enveloped me, above, below and on the sides, and he penetrated me from the genital area to the base of my throat. Our daily encounters began with stimulation in my genital area. We insatiably craved one another. We could gain release only by merging ourselves time and again. Over the first several months our sex at times lasted all night and into the next day. I had God in bed but also in field, orchard, wilderness, factory—and once even when driving a big truck. Revelation: God is very much a sexual person. Despite being a spirit he can successfully have sex with humans. Deduction: Sex can be much more, and other, than physical coupling, and its meanings go well beyond procreation. After perhaps ten months (I wasn’t counting) the intensity of the sex tapered off, and the duration diminished to maybe an hour a day. The thought barely flickered in my mind just once that, despite being more enjoyable than any other human experience, this was getting to be lot of the same kind of thing. Instantly another spiritual person took hold of me, and I had intense sex with him. I could tell that he was an enemy of God, but I could not resist him; rebellion against God through him added to the excitement and pleasure.  Revelation: Demons are real. Realizing what I’d done, I feared I’d forever separated myself from God by surrendering myself fully to his sworn enemy in knowing rebellion. Full of remorse I spiritually crawled back to God to beg forgiveness and promise never again. I feared the worst, but God took me back as though nothing had happened. God did not so much as allow me to apologize. Revelation: God does not get angry over human sin; he’s too far above it. He does not forgive sin; his presence obliterates it. Secure in God once more I proceeded to have sex with another demon the very next day. There were many of them, and they seemed to be competing with one another for a chance with me. For the next ten months or so I oscillated in this way between sex with God and sex with demons: one day with God, the next day with a demon. After every demon I had to go back to God for reassurance and love. Deduction: Sex in a committed relationship has a valuable long-term purpose; sex in “one-night stands” serves only fleeting gratification.  Deduction: My oscillatory behavior parallels the similar behavior of God’s people in the OT period of the kings and prophets as they oscillated between God and foreign deities. I began to detest my impurity and my helplessness to resist the demons when they stimulated my genitals. I knew this way of life was unstable and couldn’t last, and although I greatly enjoyed sex with God and with demons, I needed integrity and freedom from impurity. Roughly 20 months after my initial sexual encounter with God I got my “GREETINGS” from the local draft board. I could have avoided the army by returning to college, but I felt I very much needed to go into captivity in the army in the way that Judah went into captivity in Babylon to be purified. Sex with demons stopped immediately. Sex with God continued on increasingly rare occasions for a few years, but the fire had gone out, and before long sex with God also ceased altogether. Deduction: Spiritual sex is not an end in itself; once it accomplishes its purpose, it stops. General deduction based partly on subsequent experience: Persons can “see” and interact with other persons—not just God—on a purely spiritual level. Laws governing such interactions seem unrelated to laws governing interactions of material entities. My relationship with God did not end but changed. Over the 48 years since, I’ve been working on reconciling my revelation with traditional Christianity.  My "theological extrapolations" (below) summarize the results. If God had not led me into this adventure in my late teens, it’s inconceivable for several reasons that I would or could have gone on this journey with him later in life. Age and experience are priceless gifts, but there’s something precious also about youth and inexperience.

What follows here is an outline of my conclusions about how to reconcile my spiritual experiences with the Bible and traditional Christian teachings. That is, I've "extrapolated" from my limited experiences to general theological topics. Thoughts on a sexual God: Extrapolations from my thimbleful of revelation Based on 50 years' worth of interpreting extraordinary spiritual experiences My lover thrust his hand through the latch opening; my heart began to pound for him. I arose to open for my lover.... Song of Songs 5:4-5 ...The wedding of the Lamb has come, and his Woman has prepared herself. Revelation 19:7 God is sexual? Indeed. Why would God go to the trouble of creating a world where father-child was the only relationship available to him? Such relationship is less fulfilling than sexual relationship. Why should the kinds of relationship available to God be inferior to those available to his creatures? Basics God is a person (or three) who interacts as a person with humans. On revelation 1. Theological deliberations (including these) extrapolate oceans from a thimbleful of water. a. The water is the Word of God, the thimble is the vessel who has received that Word, the oceans are arrays of supposed implications. b. The particular Word of God is some manifestation of God's power that has affected the vessel's conscious relationship with God. c. A Word commonly emerges from a relationship with God. i. Such Word merges human input with the divine: it is neither purely human nor purely divine, but some combination, in the way that a child combines features of his two parents. ii. This outline is such a Word, as are also many biblical writings (e.g., Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, gospels, apostolic letters, etc.) and multitudes of other Christian testimonies and writings. iii. Such Words can take on authority for various individuals and for them become the actual Word of God (as in 1b, above). 2. The vessel regularly misinterprets his Word of God, often in ways that exaggerate its significance. 3. The Word of God despite misinterpretation works to enhance the vessel's relationship with God. a. Relationship is the thing: While the Word of God may from time to time convey facts, its overriding purpose is to create or enhance relationship. b. "True doctrines" are subordinate to relationship but have value because they can help to maintain relationship. c. (No one has true doctrines, but some are truer than others.) d. It is unreasonable to expect any Word of God to provide facts about the world beyond ones needed to enhance relationship with God.

Sex We are both god and animal, and sometimes the animal obscures the god, leaving us confused. Nowhere is this confusion more likely than in sexual intercourse (sex). I believe my spiritual experiences have given me insights to recognize features of divine sex and to discern spiritual meanings of human sex. These insights are outlined below. Human sexual activity is limitless in variety. The spiritual meanings I describe here can't possibly apply to it all but only to a limited range. I see that range as comprising--in addition to purely spiritual sex--sex primarily of young committed couples, sex of a sort implicitly enshrined in Solomon's Song of Songs. This range of sex is what I refer to below as "sex in pure form." The reader should therefore expect that I'll omit or downplay certain well-known ingredients of human physical sexual activities that lie outside this range or that otherwise obscure spiritual meanings. An objective here is to show how divine sex has much in common with an important range of human sex and is to be thought of as true sex, not just figure of speech. A second objective is to make God's sexuality more plausible by arguing that sex is not necessarily the kind of activity that first comes to mind at mention of the word but something more godly. 1. All mature persons are sexual and can engage in some form of sexual intercourse with other mature persons. a. A person is mature when he or she has established an independent identity. b. (Humans in establishing such identity commonly go through a phase where they distance themselves from their parents.) c. Identities of angels and young children have been conferred, not earned; their identities in a crucial sense are not independent, so such persons are not suited for sex. 2. Sexual intercourse (sex) among persons is spiritual at its most elemental level and can proceed without physical contact. a. God and demons are mature spiritual persons who can have sex with human lovers without making physical contact. b. Whenever true intimacy occurs in sex, it is spiritual not physical. 3. Sex in pure form involves transferring or changing personal identities. a. A male is a person who offers his identity to a female through sex. b. A female is a person who in sex surrenders herself to the male and redefines herself in him. c. (Intimate relations with parents help a child define itself; intimate relations with a male help a female redefine herself. The defining and redefining often are not deliberate but occur as byproducts of intimate interaction.) d. God is always male; other persons may be male under one set of circumstances and female under another. e. Ultimately the human male is not worthy of having another person define herself in him, so human marriages often result in a degree of disillusionment and are always temporary. 4. What if a female is unfaithful, has sex with more than one male? Does her identity change every time she takes a new lover? a. The female herself ultimately chooses whether or not to redefine herself in a given lover. b. (The wives of God in OT times [see Jeremiah 3] oscillated between God and demons ["idols" or "foreign gods"].) c. An unfaithful female may retain identity acquired from her husband if despite her behavior she remains committed to him and not to other lovers. (Think of OT nation Judah.) d. (The pleasure of sex as an act of rebellion can be so intense it's humanly impossible to resist [see Jeremiah 2:20-25, Ezekiel 16:30-34].) 5. Sexual attraction in a committed relationship depends on several things including the difference in identity of the two partners. a. Their similarities may bring lovers together, but their differences give rise to the sexual attraction. i. In sexual intimacy the male explores the differences and subjects them to his influence, while the female strives to get all of herself into contact with his identity. ii. If lovers were nearly identical at the start, the male would have little reason to explore and the female little reason to immerse herself in his identity. b. Sex is a means to an end: the redefining. Over time excitement and attraction taper off as the female takes her new identity. c. Intimacy persists over time but becomes more cerebral. Surrender of self loses relevance and fades away as the redefining goes to completion. d. Sex comes to an end but relationship endures. e. (Man/woman sex after many years of marriage serves purposes different from those of spiritual sex. Few older people are good candidates either for religious conversion or for redefining themselves.) 6. Pleasure of sex in pure form is proportional to the degree of spiritual intimacy. a. The female accepts a word from the male and decides to seek intimacy with him by surrendering herself. b. Female surrender stimulates the male to seek to enclose her within his identity and push for increased intimacy. c. The pleasure of intimacy provides positive feedback that drives the couple towards culmination of intimacy (orgasm). i. In man/woman physical sex, the woman can go through the motions perfunctorily and the man--because of the properties of his penis--can nevertheless still reach orgasm. This is pseudo-orgasm, because it comes through physical stimulation and not culmination of intimacy. ii. If in spiritual sex the female does not truly surrender herself, the male gets no satisfaction:His pleasure can come only from her pleasure, because there is no physical stimulation in spiritual sex, and it takes two to be intimate. iii. (In contrast to persons with physical bodies, God has only one "position" for sex. It is domination/submission, where God spiritually dominates and his partner spiritually submits herself.) iv. The theological term for the act of female surrender to God is worship. v. (Note that children do not worship their fathers except possibly in the sense of hero worship. In hero worship the worshiper offers up selected aspects of the self, while in sex one offers up the whole self.) vi. Certain human body parts are more eager for sexual intimacy than others and reach higher levels of enjoyment. While God and demons have no body parts they have spiritual equivalents. vii. The genital region of the single female ordinarily has low status, but because it responds to the male's probing more eagerly than all, in sex it acquires unaccustomed honor (1 Corinthians 12:22-24). 7. For purposes of sex a mature human person is not necessarily a single human but may comprise a group of humans who have taken a common identity. a. God's sexual relationships traditionally have been with groups of humans who have taken a common identity as, for example, a nation (e.g., Judah) or church (e.g., Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, Pentecostal). b. Scriptural support: Hosea 1-2; Jeremiah 2-4; Ezekiel 16, 23; Ephesians 5:22-33; 2 Corinthians 11:2; Revelation 19:7-9. c. (Scriptures refer to God in a sexual role only with respect to a group, not individuals. God's sexual role is not emphasized in Scripture partly because scriptures are largely intended for individuals.) d. The composite wives' "body parts" that are more eager for sex may be individuals whose religious experiences are more intense and less cerebral. 8. God's temporal goal with his creation is to have sex with its female persons, to receive their worship. His children are a consequence. The delay in Christ's return is both understandable and expected in light of this goal. 9. The purpose of sex is to establish deep, binding relationship where none existed. A child is evidence of the relationship; a Word is evidence of the relationship.

Females suitable for sex A female suitable for sex must come to maturity independently of the male; otherwise the identities of the two will be too similar at the start (e.g., brother and sister, father and daughter) for the female to meaningfully redefine herself through sex. 1. (If God created everything in six days by speaking a word, he would be limited to father-child relationships: Humans would attribute their origin directly to him, as young-Earth Christians have always done.) 2. Females who seem to come into existence independently of God (as through evolution) can be suitable for sex with him. 3. (The world in a crucial sense is thus necessarily independent of God. This independence leads to what people call "evils." God is off the hook; many theodicy issues resolve themselves: The world is to blame, not God.) Sin and salvation 1. Sin is whatever separates persons from God. Sin is also a state of separation from God. a. Humans at their origin were separated from God and hence born in sin. b. If there was ever a time near that origin when humans were not separated from God, it was so brief as to have been inconsequential. 2. The Word of God came into the world from the beginning as God's outreach to overcome sin, to close the gap between himself and humans. a. Humans generally enjoyed their independence and opposed God's advances. b. God never stopped trying because 1) failure was not an option and 2) he knew human life ultimately would be a waste without him. c. The Word of God eventually succeeded in winning a people, the Jews,who became God's wife. d. This wife bore him a son, Jesus, who is the Word of God made flesh. 3. Jesus is Lord and Savior because he closed the gap between God and humans and thereby overcame sin for all who accept him. a. (Jesus said, "No one comes to the Father except through me" [John 14:6]. Moses and Elijah came to the Father. Therefore Jesus' statement is not to be interpreted narrowly.) b. Jesus did not attempt to win people by first getting them to see how sinful and needy they were. Instead he put himself on display and invited people to follow. c. Jesus often equated sin not with violation of laws but with refusal to acknowledge him for who he was (John 8:24; 9:41; 15:22-25; 16:7-9). d. Jesus obeyed God unto death less to satisfy God's justice (or "pay a ransom") than to make God attractive and approachable as lover by revealing the degree of his commitment to humans and his power to save. 4. God is far less interested in making humans perfect than in establishing relationships with imperfect humans who attract him. Laws A child's life is regulated by laws imposed from above. Adults largely regulate their own behavior. 1. In early OT times God's chosen nation was a child (Ezekiel 16) in need of laws. 2. In later OT times God's chosen nation grew into adulthood. People of God collectively are now adult. Death 1. Thoughts of death gave some humans an overriding sense of guilt. Death for them could only be punishment for something they had done wrong. 2. Death is an integral aspect of creation and not punishment for sin. 3. Death serves a second purpose: It motivates search for meaning beyond the self. In absence of death few if any humans would bother to turn from their daily pursuits to God. Life after death 1. God can be true to himself only if the commitments he makes are permanent. Love, including the search for intimacy through sex, entails commitment. Therefore he will not abandon us. 2. (Not everyone can be saved; even under the best of circumstances ego will lead some to rebel. Think of fallen angels.) 3. In the age to come Christ will join himself to his Church in marriage. a. The Church is a female person comprising God's children from all his wives. b. As in every marriage there will be sex, but in that case sex will not be physical. c. God's wives on earth are not preserved as distinct spiritual entities. Their constituent children are so preserved. At present God expresses his sexuality in ways other than explicit marriage to the Church(es). Among others, he harvests where he has not sown. Is God's behavior the moral equivalent of that of a playboy? A crucial difference is that God's love is inseparable from commitment. God's behavior yields meaning and life; playboy behavior yields dissipation. The way we should think of God's behavior is as follows: The world's human population has split into many groups. God sees some of these groups as spiritual entities distinct from one another. To God, these are the world's females. He seeks intimacy (sex) with them, to offer them his identity and enclose them within himself. When he succeeds, all parties benefit.

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